


Sweater Weather

by EdgarAllenPoet



Series: Lucretia's Volumes [My Balance Fics] [25]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Family Fluff, Fluff, Gen, IPRE, Pre-Relationship, Stolen Century, Sweater Town, Team as Family, blupjeans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23509675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: “I’ll wash this and give it back later,” Lup said, appearing out of seemingly thin air to lean her full weight against Barry’s back and throw her arms over his shoulders.  He nearly fell off of his stool and onto the floor of the lab.  Lup flapped the sleeves around in his face.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Taako, Barry Bluejeans/Lup
Series: Lucretia's Volumes [My Balance Fics] [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1556773
Comments: 6
Kudos: 61





	Sweater Weather

The problem with planes without magic is, well, everything. At least, that’s what Taako had to say about the situation. Barry wasn’t exactly thrilled with having to do everything the old fashioned way, but he could cope well enough. After all, he didn’t use magic to fold his clothes and stir his coffee and carry him up the stairs and literally any other action you could think of. The twins took their magic to the next level when it came to basic activities of life. They were, in Lup’s words, “Straight up not having a good time, bro.” 

So, the problem with planes without magic is everything.

The problem with bridges is that they can be very deceptively slippery.

And the problem with water is that sometimes it is very, very cold. 

They were camping. Taako, Barry, and Davenport. Three men facing nature on a scouting adventure into an unknown world. So far, in four days, they had found seven different species of deer, probably twenty miles of pine trees, and not much else.

It was a good thing Taako knew a dozen different recipes for venison. 

They’d set up camp for the night-- tents pitched and beds rolled-- and they’d gone off to scrounge up some firewood. Barry only hand a small armful of twigs when he heard several distinctive sounds-- a yelp, a splash, and a certain elven voice shouting “Fuck! Shit! Fuck-shit it’s fucking cold as -shit-!” amid a lot of splashing. 

Barry ran towards the sound, and he came to the edge of a small pond just as Taako was dragging himself out of it, spitting water into the mud and trying to shake water off of his robes, looking a little pitiful, like a wet rat. 

He looked up and pointed a finger at Barry, glaring. “Not a word, Bluejeans,” he said, and marched back towards their campsite. Barry covered a laugh with a cough and followed after him, still holding his haul of firewood. 

The problem with camping trips is that you couldn’t really pack more than one set of clothes. 

Taako had packed a change of shirts, pants, underwear. The usual. But he only had the one robe. 

Which meant that, after getting back to the campsite and drying off to the best of his abilities, after Davenport had made the fire and Taako had wrapped himself up tight in his sleeping bag-- he was still absolutely fucking freezing.

He was -cold-. He was -damp-. His hair wouldn’t dry, and he was wearing a t-shirt and trousers like some kind of chump. He’d forgotten extra socks, so he was barefoot. He was probably going to freeze to death in the night. 

“You’re being dramatic,” Davenport said, nice and cozy in his jacket and sweater and SOCKS. 

Taako’s teeth were chattering as he glared at their captain and said, “I am considering mutiny.” He pulled his knees up to his chest and rubbed his hands over his arms and suddenly found something blue and lumpy being held out towards him. He looked up at Barry, who was squinting down at him in the fire light.

“I’m warm enough without it,” Barry said, and Taako took the hoodie with suspicious, narrowed eyes. It was the kind of soft that came from lots of use and years of washing. The logo on the front was for a university, -not- the IPRE, maybe Barry’s undergraduate alma mater? 

But Barry was warm enough without it, had both his robe and his sleeping bag, and the hoodie was -soft- and Taako was -freezing-. 

He threw it on, pulling the hood up and hunkering down into it, sighing contentedly. Better. So much better. 

He glanced sideways, noticing movement, and saw Barry half-way to crouching down next to him. 

“I’m not in the mood to cuddle, my man,” he said, and Barry jumped back to his feet. 

“Right!” he said. “Yeah, no, of course not, okay.” He made his way quickly back to his own sleeping bag, and Taako curled up tighter in the hoodie and scootched a little closer to the fire, so close to warm.

\---

Taako gave the hoodie back, and a few days deeper into their trip, it started to snow lightly. Taako found himself once again wishing for magic, wanting to prestidigitate all this bullshit away from him, and Barry once again found himself handing over his hoodie. 

He had a robe, and two shirts, and a good forty pounds on Taako. He wasn’t a stick figure. He wasn’t going to freeze to death in the snow. 

Davenport decided it was about time for them to head on back the way they came, and Barry said Taako could keep the hoodie until their trip was over.

\---

Two weeks later, Barry was wandering into the kitchen late in the morning when he found Taako at the coffee maker. Taako was, once again, wearing his hoodie. He had the hood up and cinched tight, so only his face and a poof of golden hair was showing from the mass of baggy fabric. 

“Yo,” Taako said, instead of good morning. “It’s cold as balls today.” 

It was, but Barry had other sweaters. He decided not to worry about it. 

\---

“Where’d you get that?” 

Taako was untangling himself from the hoodie when Lup asked, trying to get his hair free from the strings with both arms half out of the sleeves and the whole thing still over his head. His fingers stumbled, he yanked, tugged his own hair a bit, but managed to get it free, then he ripped the thing off of his head and took in a big, gulping breath.

Lup was watching him with a dubious expression.

“Barold.”

Her ears quirked a little. Taako very carefully contained a smirk, kept his face innocent, asked, “You want it?” 

Lup’s ears twitched again. “Is it soft?” 

“Hella soft.” 

Lup held her hand out, and Taako tossed it over. She caught it, raised an eyebrow, and rubbed it between her hands.

“Wow,” she said. “Hella soft.” 

“Natch.” 

Later, when Taako fell asleep in the middle of a fantasy Sex in the City marathon (some plane they’d visited fourteen years prior had an invention called a “portable DVD player.” Unfortunately, the only “DVD” they had that still worked was a “Sex in the City box set.” Good thing that show was fantastic), and he woke up to the menu screen looping and Lup drooling on her pillow next to him, he noticed that Lup was bundled up in Barry’s hoodie. She had the sleeves over her hands and was cradling her hands up to her nose. She was smiling. 

Taako smirked, big and proud and braggy, and grabbed an extra pillow off of his bunk to hug while he fell asleep.

\---

“I’ll wash this and give it back later,” Lup said, appearing out of seemingly thin air to lean her full weight against Barry’s back and throw her arms over his shoulders. He nearly fell off of his stool and onto the floor of the lab. Lup flapped the sleeves around in his face. 

“Sure,” Barry said, choking on air and trying to remember how to breathe, grateful that she was behind him and couldn’t see the way his face was heating up, because she was wearing -his sweater-.

Across the desk from him, Lucretia glanced up from her notebook and gave the tiniest grin. Barry wasn’t sure what it meant, exactly, but he had a notion. He picked up his coffee mug and used the movement to subtly flip her off. 

He took a sip, and as he did, Lup kissed him on the cheek and shoved away from him to skip back out the room. The kiss and the shove combined were enough to make Barry snort his coffee up his nose, and then spend the next five minutes hacking coffee out of his lungs while Lucretia laughed herself breathless on the floor of the lab.

\---

“What school is that?” Magnus asked, and Taako glanced down at himself to squint at the logo.

-Huh-, he thought, because he wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know where the sweater had come from. It hadn’t been in his closet, he was pretty sure, but then there it was. Nothing spectacular had happened in the time before its appearance-- he’d gone to training, met up with Lucretia, bitched about the terrible sleep he’d been getting lately (his brain was being especially whack), and gotten dinner with the boys, and then there it was. 

Ah well, unimportant. What was important was that it was warm. And soft.

The screen print on the front was faded and barely legible, but Taako was about forty-three percent sure it said “Brinkley’s School of Arcane Engineering: Create. Enhance. Destroy.” 

Rather cryptic message for a place of learning. Must have produced a bunch of total weirdo alumni. 

He said, “I don’t know every school, Maggie. Probably dug it outta a bin at the fantasy Goodwill.” 

“That’s how you catch fantasy head lice,” Merle said. Magnus wrinkled his nose up, reached up and scratched at his scalp. Taako shrugged idly. He’d had head lice before. Wasn’t the worst thing ever. Didn’t hold a candle to fleas.

Which the sweater didn’t have. Taako may have been stupid, but he wasn’t -gross-. 

\---

“Holy shit!” Lup yelled, and Taako came skidding into the room. It was good to be corporeal again. Good to get to worry about things like -clothes-. The packing/unpacking process after the whole end-of-the-world hullabaloo had been a “throw it in a box and yeet that box through a portal” situation. Lup had hardly been involved, and Taako had wanted to be in-and-out of the Starblaster as fast as he could manage.

As if Lup hadn’t caught him napping on the common room couch a few months later-- even though the ship had been donated to the history museum and was on display for full walk-throughs. That day’s guests had been incredibly pleased to find one of the seven birds -inside- the Starblaster that day, and the tour guides hadn’t been able to figure out the words to kick him out. She’d eventually had to come coax him out of the thing, and he’d come out a little dazed and misty eyed, what a sap. 

But, anyways, back on track. Clothes were dope as hell. Her clothes in particular were dope as hair. But more importantly, Barry’s clothes were dope as hell. They were so Big. And cozy. She could wrap herself up in them and disappear. They smelled like her husband. 

She held the hoodie she’d found up to her face and buried her nose in it. 

Okay, correction. This one, strangely enough, smelled like her brother. 

Good enough. 

“What is that?” Taako asked, and then looked a bit like he’d been hit by a truck as he stared at it. “Fuck,” he said eloquently. “I was wondering where that came from. Huh.” 

“This is a dope slogan for a school,” Lup said, reading it over before pulling the sweater on. She sighed happily, wrapping her arms around herself and flopping down onto the floor. 

“It’s so -warm-,” she gushed, and Taako sighed in the exaggeratedly loud way that meant he was rolling his eyes at her. 

“You’re disgusting,” he said, but Lup was too busy remembering the look on Barry’s face every time she walked by him wearing it. How after the symposium she’d started stealing his clothes on the regular. That time Davenport caught them in the lab early one morning, Barry in only his boxers, and Lup in the hoodie and nothing else, and how they’d lied red-faced and through their teeth about waking up -inspired- by -research-. Hachi matchi.

“I don’t know what that look on your face is, but it’s disgusting too,” Taako told her, and she flipped him off.

\---

The bonfire was excellent. Sand, beach, good food, fruity drinks. Kravitz was unwinding, had already managed to charm the hell out of the crew and was now just starting to settle in, thank Istus for that. Taako wanted to keep the guy around, and he needed his boy to be chill with Taako’s whole pseudo-family situation for this to really fit. 

And he -was-. It was fan-fucking-tastic. 

He’d had his reservations about Merle’s little beach house get together, but it was proving its worth in gold, natch. Taako had just wandered back to the house to get himself another fantasy Mike’s Hard, and he was about to leave the kitchen when a certain boy detective bounced on in. 

He was smiling. There was sand in his hair. He was also shivering slightly. 

“What’s the matter with you?” Taako asked. The child was wearing swim trunks and a t-shirt and nothing else. The sun had set nearly an hour ago, and the temperature was slowly making it’s way from ‘residual sun’ to ‘pretty darn cold.’ “Are you trying to catch pneumonia?” 

“You don’t catch pneumonia from just being cold, sir,” Angus corrected, while Taako went to the guest room to dig around in his bag. Which was... somewhere. Screw it. He dug around in Lup’s bag. 

“You’re right,” Taako said. “You catch it from being cold and -wet-, Ango. What are they teaching you at that Miller place anyways?” 

Angus laughed. He said, “Uh, not medicine, sir.” 

Taako found something soft and warm and lumpy. He threw it Angus’s direction with an order to put it on. It was obnoxiously big on the boy, hanging down to his knees and covering his hands generously. Taako rolled the sleeves up, tugged the hood over Angus’s head, and shooed him back out the door. 

“Don’t go into the water like that, you’ll drown or something,” he called after him, while Angus ran back to the bonfire.

“Okay sir, I won’t!” 

Taako made his way over at a more relaxed pace, and when he made his way back to his seat Angus and Mavis were laughing about the slogan printed on the t-shirt, inventing some kind of story about killer robots, which really was more fact than fiction, all things considered. 

Taako flopped down next to Barry, who was giving him an incredulous look over the top of Lup’s head. Lup was dozing against his chest, drawing idle circles on his knee with her finger. 

He said, **“Will my sweater -ever- be returned to me?”** and Lup woke up enough to press a kiss to his lips and pat his cheek with her fingers. 

“Wouldn’t count on it.” 


End file.
